Baudelaire the Damned: A Biography

Introduction

‘En somme, je crois que ma vie a été damnée dès le commencement, et qu’elle l’est pour toujours.’ (Letter from Baudelaire to his mother, December 4th, 1854)

Except among a few small and disregarded sects, damnation in the primitive sense of the word has today become an obsolete concept. We have to go back to the Elizabethans to find a time when it still kept its full force and meaning, and it always requires a certain effort to see things as those distant forefathers of ours saw them. If it were not that Hamlet has now become so familiar and hallowed a text, we might well think the hero slightly freakish to refrain from despatching the King when he could, for no other reason than that Claudius happens to be at his prayers when the Prince comes upon him. Hamlet wants to be revenged not just here in Denmark but in the hereafter too; so he will wait a more convenient moment, when his uncle is

             about some act      

That has no relish of salvation in’t:

Then trip him, that his heels may kick at heaven;

And that his soul may be as damned, and black,

As hell, whereto it goes.

Similarly, it is only by a conscious adjustment that we can accept what Marlowe’s contemporaries had no difficulty in believing, which was that once Faustus had struck his bargain with Mephistopheles and once the forfeit fell due, nothing could save him from being ‘damned perpetually’.

Two centuries of ‘progress’ and ‘enlightenment’ supervened before Goethe turned back to the Faust legend which Marlowe had presented in all its medieval simplicity. For Goethe, it was too crude, and he sidestepped the issue of damnation; even though the Devil wins his wager, Faust is let off having to pay. The notion of a beneficent Deity allowing eternal torment to be inflicted on His own creatures, however disobedient and rebellious, was more than nineteenth-century liberals could stomach.

But Baudelaire was not a nineteenth-century liberal; indeed, to many of his contemporaries, including one suspects Flaubert, he appeared as something of a throwback: regressive in his moral outlook, however modern he may have been in other respects - in his aesthetic insights, for instance. It is impossible not to be struck, as one reads him, by the frequency of his use of the word damnation and its cognates; the sentence we have picked as epigraph is simply the most memorable instance that can be found in his writings: ‘In short, I believe that my life has been damned from the beginning, and that it is damned forever.’

We notice that Baudelaire does not call himself damned, but only his life; his biographer has to explain how this life came to be damned, but need not take into account the possibility that he who lived that life was and is now among the company of the damned. There is little evidence that Baudelaire seriously visualized the afterlife in conventional terms of heaven and hell, and even if he did, it is most unlikely that he would have imagined hell quite as Dante imagined it … or Wyndham Lewis. As to the kind of existence reserved for humanity beyond the grave, he kept an open mind; he was curious about it, and curiously hopeful; had it been otherwise, had he seriously entertained the notion of a Catholic God sitting in judgement on the souls of the departed, no doubt he would have embraced again, before his death, the faith that he lost in his late teens. But he did believe very firmly that certain lives are damned on this earth and that his was one of these.

In the first of these beliefs he came close to what one imagines must have been, to judge by the tenor of some of his more important tragedies, the viewpoint of Jean Racine, though Racine was not an author whom Baudelaire studied closely or esteemed very highly. For Racine deals in charmed lives - charmed, however, not by some kindly spirit but by a hostile outside force which, irrespective of the struggles of his heroines, Queen Phaedra or Queen Athaliah, to suppress the wayward urgings of their natures or deflect the remorseless course of history, overcomes all their efforts. Some there are that have not grace, and are in this sense damned. The affinities between Baudelaire’s philosophy of life and the doctrines of Jansenism that so deeply marked Racine are so remarkable that attempts have even been made to prove that Baudelaire received, through his father, a Jansenist upbringing. The evidence, however, is too tenuous for the theory to be seriously considered.

Damnation in this sense implies predestination, and sometimes there is little that separates the two ideas, except of course that the first always leads to misfortune and misery, whereas the second can lead to greatness and glory. In a passage of his important monograph on the illustrator Constantin Guys, Baudelaire tells a story he claims to have heard from one of his friends, an artist of repute whom he does not name but who might have been Manet. ‘When he was very small, he used to be present when his father was performing his morning ablutions; on these occasions he would contemplate, in stupor mingled with rapture, the muscles in the arms, the gradual shading of the colour of the skin from pink to yellow, and the bluish network of the veins. The images of the external world were already filling him with admiration and taking hold of his mind. Forms were already obsessing and possessing him. Predestination was prematurely showing the tip of its nose. His damnation was already accomplished.’ It is Baudelaire who italicizes the word.

Here damnation can almost be equated with vocation, and it might be objected that Baudelaire is straining the meaning of the word, or trivializing it. However, in his century it was almost a commonplace that a vocation for art or poetry was inseparable from moral suffering and only too often entailed desperate material privation as well. The concept of le poète maudit was given wide currency by Verlaine in the 1880s but had really been launched fifty-years earlier by Alfred de Vigny in a semi-fictional, semi-historical work entitled Stello. In this book Vigny tells the life stories of three poets, all of whom died young and in wretched or infamous circumstances: of sickness (Laurent Gilbert), of the fatal dose of laudanum that he took to escape a humiliating fate (Thomas Chatterton), and on the scaffold, sentenced for the political crime of having lampooned the Jacobins (André Chénier). The moral Vigny draws from his triple apologue is that no matter how society is constituted, whether the form of government is an absolute monarchy, an oligarchy, or a revolutionary committee, the poet invariably suffers.

He suffers, however, as Vigny argues, not because he is damned (which would imply persecution on a cosmic scale), but because he is an outcast, a pariah, an object of suspicion to men in power. The romantics thought that society had no room for the poet - although, curiously, there never was a period in France when writers were better represented in the corridors of power; the careers of Chateaubriand, Lamartine, and Hugo go a long way to disproving Vigny’s thesis. Whatever the truth of it, and even though he quoted Stello approvingly and found in Poe a fourth instance to add to Vigny’s trilogy, Baudelaire did not feel that Vigny had got to the heart of the matter. It might be indeed that the poet tended to be misunderstood and undervalued by society, but that was a relatively trivial irritation. The poet was damned, with a private damnation that had nothing to do with public reprobation, and Baudelaire needed only to consider his own case to be convinced of this. From the moment of his conception to the hour when he drew his last breath, every circumstance conspired against him: his ancestry was tainted, his birth unlucky, his parents and teachers persecuted him, his mistress betrayed him; he was racked by disease and his neuroticism made him miserable; he lost his money or, worse, it was placed in the hands of a snuffling man of the law who doled him out a starvation allowance; his works, when they appeared, were misunderstood, condemned as pornographic. Finally he had to flee his own country, and in solitary exile was struck down by the paralysis that robbed him of the power of speech and in which he dragged out miserably the few remaining months of his life before dying at the age of forty-six.

As Nicole Ward Jouve has put it with superb understatement, ‘Nobody but a lunatic would recommend Baudelaire’s life as a pattern to be imitated.’ What this observation seems to imply is that the pattern of one’s life is to a certain degree a matter of choice. And if Baudelaire’s life pattern was so unenviable, could it not be that he consistently made the wrong choices, thus working his own damnation? Was it bad luck or his own folly that led him to contract syphilis at the age of eighteen and at the age of twenty-three to show himself so incapable of handling his own affairs that he was declared legally unfit to remain in charge of them? The idea that he chose his own fate, or perhaps rather that, his fate being what it was, Baudelaire failed to make the choices that would have allowed him to escape from it, has been most persuasively argued by Jean-Paul Sartre, but the charge loses some of its edge in face of the readiness of the accused to admit it. For Baudelaire never regarded himself as an innocent victim; on the contrary, he was paralysed by a sense of guilt, by the consciousness of his own shortcomings. From boyhood through to the last, he was constantly adjuring himself to shake off his lethargy, to overcome the vice of procrastination, to avoid what he regarded as sin, to accomplish his mission. He did accomplish it of course; Les Fleurs du Mal was written, unquestionably the most profound and influential single volume of poetry in the French language if not in the whole of world literature, and a corrosive sense of failure on this plane, the artistic, was the one misfortune that Baudelaire was spared. But in no other respect did his efforts allow him to triumph over what he called the ‘irremediable’ or the ‘irreparable’. He could not see himself as having his place among the elect. The nature of his damnation was that he could have said ‘yes’ to his better promptings, but he could not help constantly saying ‘no’ or ‘not yet’. In this sense, in a purely theological if not Christian sense, he was damned, and he never expressed it more clearly than in the sonnet entitled The Rebel.

An Angel pounces like a bird of prey,

Seizes the sinner firmly by the hair,

Shakes him in fury: ‘Hear me, and obey!

I’m your good angel, and I’ll make you care.

Know then that you must love, and with good grace

The poor, the warped, the mean and dull of mind.

At Jesus’ feet a carpet you shall place

Of loving-kindness woven; – for to be kind

Is Love. Let not your heart grow cold,

But to God’s glory let the flame take hold

Of lasting bliss, true rapture’s steady glow.’

The Angel thus, chastising in Love’s name,

With giant talons rends his victim’s frame;

But, being damned, the wretch still answers: ‘No!’

*        *        *

When the biographer’s subject is a poet who wrote in a foreign language, he is faced with a particular difficulty in deciding how he should quote, as he is bound to from time to time, from the poetic works. To reproduce the original poem in the original language and leave it at that is to make unreal and perhaps slightly arrogant assumptions when one’s readership is drawn from the English-speaking world. To append prose translations to accompany Baudelaire’s French would have been not just cumbersome but wholly inadequate. Poetry is always much more than its mere meaning; the stanzaic form, the metre, the rhythm and the rhymes are quite as much part of the poem as the bare sense of what is being said. The solution I have adopted in this book has been to use verse translations which, while departing as little as can be contrived from the literal meaning of the original, preserve religiously Baudelaire’s rhyming schemes, to which he attached such importance (calling rhymes ‘the lanterns that light up the pathway of the idea’), and as far as the metre is concerned, to approximate as closely as possible to the original, with one obvious exception: the line of verse most commonly found in French is the dodecasyllable, and I have transposed this everywhere by the most commonly used line in English verse, which is, of course, the pentameter.

Les Fleurs du Mal has of course attracted a great number of translators. I have not studied their work, nor compared my versions with theirs, and any resemblances there may be arise therefore purely from chance.

I

Caroline

Every man assumes the day will come when he will be mourner at his mother’s funeral, though perhaps only the morbid or the melancholic will give the eventuality much thought beforehand; being so much in the course of nature, it is regarded as scarcely less inevitable than one’s own death. The contrary possibility, that once the hazards of infancy are behind him a grown man should none the less be laid in the grave by the same woman as brought him into the world, has always seemed so remote and problematic that a steady mind could never entertain it for more than a fleeting moment. Yet this very possibility, at certain times of his life, haunted Baudelaire; he even discussed it with his mother in agony of spirit; and, in the event, his premonition proved justified. Alone in the death-chamber with him, she held him in her arms and watched him breathe his last, stroking his forehead while he smiled - so she reported - tenderly up at her; in love and gratitude, or with relief that he was at last to be freed from her? We can only guess which it was.

Even though they never lived under the same roof together for more than a few weeks except when he was a child, and were sometimes separated by thousands of miles of land and sea, they were never for long out of touch with one another. Each kept the other’s letters and although his mother appears to have destroyed all hers when they came back into her possession at her son’s death, she kept all or most of his, and this series of some 360 letters not only represents the fullest single source of information available to us concerning the wretched tribulations of his day-to-day existence, but in addition provides the elements of a case-history, possibly unique in the literature of psychology, of a mother-son relationship of truly monstrous morbidity. Here we have a man of outstandingly, virile genius totally dependent from birth to death, not only financially but emotionally, on a lesser spirit for whom notwithstanding we are bound to feel some sympathy: a puzzled duck that had hatched a black swan, to use Jacques Crépet’s trivial but apt comparison.¹ Baudelaire’s feelings for his mother ran very deep, and were the more violent because they were contradictory, forming a churning devil’s brew in which strong affection conflicted with harsh resentment, while gratitude for her anxious concern for his welfare was poisoned by scalding anger at the limitations of her understanding of his hopes and purposes.

It goes without saying that there were other women in his life who meant more to the sensual and even spiritual side of his nature; it was they who inspired the succession of sombre and radiant cycles of love-poetry in Les Fleurs du Mal. As for his mother, the book contained in its first edition only two pieces directly addressed to her and, typically, she failed to notice them when she first read it so that he was obliged to write and point them out to her. But there was another poem, placed immediately after the dedicatory ode ‘To the Reader’, to which he did not draw her attention but in which he seems to have summed up, obliquely and as it were anonymously, the tragic sense of maternal rejection that ran like a thick black thread through the whole tangled web of his feelings for her. The poem bears the ironical title ‘Benediction’, and the first five verses run something like this:

When, in obedience to divine decree,

The Poet enters on life’s tawdry stage,

His frantic mother, filled with blasphemy

Strikes at the God of Mercy in her rage.

‘Rather bring forth a writhing knot of snakes

Than put this freakish monster to my breast!

Curs’d be the night, whose short-lived pleasure makes

Conception penance, and its fruit a jest.

Since of all women Thou hast chosen me

To be dishonoured in my husband’s sight;

Since I may not destroy this parody

Like a love-letter that one sets alight,

I will deflect thy wrath that crushes me

On to this damnèd source of my despair.

I shall so twist and nip this wretched tree

That never a bud will burst to foul the air.’

Thus does she spit her rage and swallow her shame,

Ignorant of what was planned from earliest times;

Kindling herself the purgatorial flame

Designed for mothers guilty of her crimes.

*        *        *

Baudelaire’s mother was born in London on September 27th, 1793, and given the names Caroline Archenbaut when baptized at St Paneras Church the following year. Both her parents were refugees from the Terror, seeking safety in England like thousands of others; Caroline’s mother, Louise-Julie, née Foyot, is said to have been already carrying her when she crossed the Channel. The father was a certain Charles Defayis, about whom nothing is known beyond the fact that he was a royalist officer, which would imply that his family had been ennobled under the ancien régime. The Foyots belonged to the upper middle classes, the family fortunes having been founded by Louise-Julie’s grandfather, who did well enough in trade to purchase his son (her father) the office of attorney-at-law in the Paris parlement.² In an undated note written in the latter part of his life, Baudelaire makes a passing reference to ‘my ancestors, idiots or madmen, living in gloomy apartments, all of them victims of terrible passions’.³ Since his own father came of sound peasant stock, and his maternal grandfather, as we have seen, was a respectable lawyer, the remark can only apply to Caroline’s father, Charles Defayis, and his forbears, and unless it is pure fantasy must derive from confidences he remembered his mother having made him at some point. But hitherto it has not proved possible to show whether or not he was mistaken in thinking that he had a tainted ancestry; the earlier history of the Defayis family remains shrouded in mystery to this day. His belief that madness ran in his blood is, however, of possibly greater significance than the truth or otherwise of the presumption. It was, to his way of thinking, the first nail in the coffin of his predestined damnation.

Caroline must have remained in England, if not in London, for at least the first few years of her life, since it was only at this time that she could have acquired the knowledge of English that enabled her later on not only to appreciate her son’s virtuosity in translating Edgar Allan Poe but to give him lessons in pronunciation.⁴ But she may not have been much more than a child when she lost both her parents and, with them, all means of support. Luckily she escaped the charity orphanage that might have been her lot; Pierre Pérignon, a friend of her mother’s father and a lawyer like him, adopted her, and until her marriage in 1819 she enjoyed a comfortable home life in the Pérignons’ spacious establishment in Paris. Thanks to their care and generosity, she received the kind of education that was given in those days to girls of good family; later, an initiation under their wing into society life helped her acquire the tact and poise that was to stand her in such good stead, many years later, when as the wife of the French ambassador in Constantinople and Madrid she found herself having to entertain travellers of distinction at embassy parties. For her foster-mother Mme Pérignon, the handsome daughter of a West Indies planter who had returned to France shortly before the Revolution, was noted for her salon, a magnet during the Empire and under the Restoration for leading political figures and legal luminaries. In her late teens, once she had left the elegant school for young ladies where she had been boarded, Caroline Defayis might have been seen regularly in this drawing-room, handing round orangeade and cakes and possibly called on from time to time to perform on one of the recently popularized pianofortes imported from England.

It may well have been here that she first made the acquaintance of an old friend of her guardian’s, a widower in his late fifties called Joseph-François Baudelaire. In addition she saw him on occasions when the Pérignons were invited to dine with him in the charming grace-and-favour house which he had been allocated in consideration of his office as chief curator of the Luxembourg Palace. Caroline enjoyed these visits, particularly after the gates were locked in the evening and she had free run of the gardens. As for their host, although he appeared to the twenty-year-old girl an old man, with his crisply curling grey hair and eyebrows ‘black as ebony’, she appreciated his cheerful conversation and fund of entertaining stories as much as did the other members of the Pérignon family, who liked to compare him to La Fontaine for his simplicity and good nature.

François Baudelaire and Pierre Pérignon had known one another from their boyhood, when both had studied the classics at the venerable scholastic establishment of Sainte-Barbe. On leaving school, Pérignon had gone in for the law, while Baudelaire had entered the teaching profession, not however as an ill-paid usher but as private tutor to the sons of one of the most powerful nobles of France, the Duc de Choiseul-Praslin. This enviable situation allowed him to mingle on equal terms with many of the leading liberal intellectuals of the reign of Louis XVI, among them Condorcet, the materialist philosopher Cabanis, and Helvétius’s widow whose salon was frequented, in the years immediately preceding the Revolution, by a number of the more prominent encyclopédistes. In this company the young François Baudelaire acquired the polished manners so appreciated later by those of an age to remember the douceur de vivre of pre-Revolutionary France. He also formed some useful friendships which not only helped him survive unscathed the turmoil of Jacobin rule but also enabled him to render no small service to the family of his patrons whom, so the story goes, he kept alive during the bread famine by sharing with them the payments in kind he received from a baker to whose daughter he was giving drawing lessons.

For drawing was one of François Baudelaire’s many minor talents; he had, indeed, a keen interest in all aspects of the fine arts, a bent inherited, as we shall see, by his son. It was undoubtedly his expertise and taste in artistic matters that led Napoleon to appoint him steward of the Luxembourg Palace (used at that time as the Senate debating chamber), with primary responsibility for commissioning statues for the gardens and pictures for the assembly rooms and galleries. He was a private collector too, on a small scale, specializing in engravings and plaster casts, and, encouraged by his artist friends, had tried his hand at pastels and painting in gouache. A shared love of art was no doubt largely instrumental in creating the bond between him and the amateur painter Jeanne-Justine-Rosalie Janin, whom he married in 1797. The couple had one child born to them and then, in December 1814, his wife’s death left him alone in the world apart from his son, Claude-Alphonse, then a boy of nine.

It must have been loneliness, together with the yearning of late middle age for the restorative freshness of nubile youth, that drew him to his friend Pérignon’s lively young ward. The offer of marriage, conveyed to her in all probability by Mme Pérignon, would not have struck Caroline as being wildly incongruous; in France at this period it was not at all unusual for men to marry women young enough to be their daughters. The age difference here was 34 years; it had been 32 between Balzac’s father and mother. François Baudelaire was a well-preserved sexagenarian, with an easy-going disposition, and she had known him for a good many years. He could offer her a secure future: apart from the quite handsome emoluments attached to his post, he had inherited from his first wife a sizeable acreage of agricultural land situated on the outskirts of Paris which could only appreciate in value and in the meantime brought in a useful rental. Caroline herself had no fortune at all worth speaking of - her dowry was a mere 1000 francs - and even if she had been outstandingly beautiful she could hardly have expected, in her circumstances, to encounter a suitor nearer her own age with means to support her. Young men married to better themselves in those days. The alternative to accepting old Baudelaire’s offer would have been to remain an unmarried dependant of her guardian who, she probably thought, had exercised his charity towards her long enough. So she accepted the arrangement with good grace if not with positive alacrity.

They were married on September 9th, 1819, and on April 9th, 1821, the first and only child of the union, Charles-Pierre Baudelaire, was born at no. 13, rue Hautefeuille, a turreted house of antique appearance which consisted inside of a veritable bee-hive of little rooms stuffed with the products of François Baudelaire’s mania for collecting objets d’art; according to the inventory drawn up after his death, there were no fewer than 27 pieces of sculpture in the house and over 200 pictures, 54 in the library alone, which abutted on to the child’s nursery.⁵ Many of the oil-paintings had been executed by his first wife; she had had a studio in the Rue de Vaugirard and at her death the widower had transported the greater part of the contents to the establishment where he was to welcome his second wife.⁶ Caroline was far from sharing her husband’s love of art; she was, besides, prudish enough to feel some embarrassment at being perpetually surrounded by images of naked nymphs and lusty satyrs, which she quietly removed one by one, replacing them by other less indecent pictures stored in the attics. But she was unable to do anything about the prize piece in her husband’s collection, a plaster replica of the Graeco-Roman Hermaphrodite, copied from the version in the Louvre, which continued shamelessly to display its swelling buttocks in a place of honour on the mantelpiece.

When in later life Charles Baudelaire tried to trace back to its origins the curse that he was convinced had been laid on him from the very moment he entered the world, he did not forget to mention, half-seriously, that the house of his birth did bear the unlucky number 13. But much more reasonably, he pointed out in talking to the Belgian journalist Georges Barrai that he might well have owed his ‘execrable temperament’ to the fact that he was the offspring of so ill-matched a couple. ‘My frayed nerves are due to their disparity. That’s what comes of being the unbalanced child of a mother of twenty-seven and a father aged sixty-two.’⁷ But it was not simply the advanced age at which his father begot him that had to be taken into account; there was another, far more sinister cause for the evil fate that hung over his life.

So many of the sallies attributed to Baudelaire were clearly designed only to shock or surprise his listeners, that suspicion inevitably attaches to almost any disclosure he made about his family origins. For this reason, the remarks he was overheard to make about his father having worn a priest’s cassock, his habit of referring to himself as ‘the son of a priest’, were for a long time discounted as just one more of the poet’s frivolous boasts, inspired perhaps by the indiscreet comments of gossip-column writers on the semi-clerical costume he affected in the 1860s. In recent years, however, quite irrefutable evidence has come to light which shows that François Baudelaire was indeed exercising the functions of a priest in the diocese of Châlons-sur-Marne in 1785, though the exact record, and therefore date, of his ordination has so far not been discovered. It has further been established that only six days after the Convention issued a decree (dated November 13th, 1793) permitting priests to ‘abdicate their authority’ (i.e. renounce their office), François Baudelaire availed himself of the opportunity. So did, of course, a number of others at the time, but the speed with which he defrocked himself indicates fairly convincingly that he must have lost his faith some time earlier.⁸

In a Roman Catholic country, if not now then certainly in the earlier part of the nineteenth century, to have had as one’s father a man who, at a previous point in his life, had taken orders and had subsequently left the Church would be regarded as a matter of extreme gravity. Among the faithful at least it would imply that the child was the issue of a union not just unsanctified but probably accursed. The vow of celibacy taken by the man on ordination could never be lifted by a mere administrative act on the part of the civil authorities, especially when controlled by an atheistic and revolutionary government. The child was thus the living proof of his father’s sacrilege, his very presence in the world something unnatural, an offence in the eyes of God. How could this essential stigma ever be erased, how could this original sin ever be redeemed?

But it was his mother rather than his father that the poet blamed when he learned the truth. She must have known the situation before she married; her guardian, or the bridegroom himself, would have had to explain it to her, if only to account for the fact that their wedding could not be celebrated in church. She could have refused to proceed, but instead she sacrificed her religious scruples on the altar of worldly considerations. Yet she continued to pass herself off, hypocritically, as a dutiful daughter of the Church. His father had at least had the decency to abjure his religion.

All through his life, Baudelaire cultivated his father’s memory with touching reverence. At the age of seventeen he wrote to Alphonse, his half-brother, asking to be shown a few samples of the poetry he had heard their father had composed. Years later he told his mother he had come across a couple of his father’s pictures in a junk shop, but to his annoyance he did not have the money to pay a deposit on them. The terms of his letter make it clear that he was angry she should have sold them, though the descriptions he gives of them also suggest her reasons for having done so: they were both studies of nudes. The one picture he himself never parted with was J. B. Regnault’s portrait of his father. He took it with him when he moved to Honfleur to stay with his mother, and he mentions it again in a doleful letter written to her on May 6th, 1861: ‘I am alone, with no friends, no mistress, without even a dog or a cat to complain to. I have only the portrait of my father which is for ever mute.’ Two years later she sent him all the letters from François Baudelaire that she had kept, and he was overjoyed. ‘These old papers have something magical about them,’ he wrote. ‘You could not have chosen a surer way to touch my heart.’⁹

The portrait referred to was painted around 1810 and showed a younger man than Baudelaire can have remembered. When he was in reminiscent mood he would tell his friends how his father, an old man with long white hair, would take him for walks in the Luxembourg Gardens, shaking his stick at any stray dog that might gambol up, and telling him stories about the gods and heroes which the statues represented. They were not the same statues as one sees there today, but guide-books of the period list them for us; they were all copies or originals of antique figures, several of them no doubt forming part of the booty that Napoleon sent back to France at the conclusion of his Italian campaign of 1796-7. They included a Diane, a Hebe, various Venuses, no fewer than seven Bacchuses, a gladiator, and two groups of wrestlers, besides allegorical figures of Night and Winter.¹⁰ The earliest impact of the classical tradition thus reached the child Baudelaire through works of plastic art, long before he was introduced to the literatures of Greece and Rome.

He lost his father on February 10th, 1827, a little before his sixth birthday. The old